Читать книгу In a Yün-nan Courtyard - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 5

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Long before sunrise So Wing crept noiselessly from the house of Q’ūo Chung, carrying a lighted lantern swinging at the end of a long pliant bamboo.

So Wing was gone all day—for the nearest town was ten or more hard miles away, as the Chinese crows fly, and the way was mountainous and tortuous.

For a long li the narrow path he took clung close to the river’s twisted side. The willows that fringed the footway looked grey where the lantern-light found them, the trunks of the oaks showed black. There was no moon. The intense dark was relentless. A cactus tore So Wing’s leg; he swore at it, and went more carefully, and swung his lantern lower. But presently he lifted it again, that he might see and search what grew on his left hand, higher than his head. So Wing was watching for a clump of three mulberry-trees and a lofty rectangular column.

When he came upon that landmark he turned from the river and began to climb a rock path that rose vertically in rude steps which were scarcely a foot wide but fully a foot high.

It was a perilous climb. Myriad coolie feet, that had climbed and descended it for centuries, had worn the high steps’ scant and narrow foothold to glassy smoothness; the heavy night-dew made them addedly slippery. But So Wing went on. Twice he nearly fell. Once he did fall. But he caught the step above him with his free hand, and gripped it tight with his sinewy fingers—more by force of will than by muscle.

Vine-roped tree-limbs bent across the dangerous ladder of treacherous rock steps that he was mounting with more and more difficulty. Again and again limb or vine-rope caught and almost threw him.

But So Wing went on.

Presently his hard way grew easier; his inhospitable footholds no securer, no wider or less slippery, but vegetation no longer entangled him as he climbed. He had passed up into the naked rock-belt, crag after crag of barren limestone. And So Wing breathed easier; his lantern swung freer in a less cramped and restricted arm-hold.

Another long, neck-break li, and again his path rose through verdure. But it was an earth-path now, wider, and of more gradual ascent.

So Wing kept his patient jog-trot steadily, the pace he went neither slower nor quicker than it had been when he came through the tall cactus-hedge that enfenced all Q’ūo Chung’s homestead. So would have been hard pressed to spurt—long and fast—but he could jog-trot on evenly and undistressed for incredible hours. Such Chinese wayfarers, if almost incapable of hurry, have little need to slack or to tarry. Their dogged persistence, though it shows no glamour, is splendid.

Just as the boy reached the apex of his long climb the new day hinted its coming.

So Wing halted then; not for breath, not to look about him, or down at the way he had come—it still was too dark for that—but to watch the sunrise.

Chinese poverty has great wealth. Nature’s coffers are open wide to Chinese eyes. No Chinese coolie too poor to do constant reverence to wayside flower or mountain panorama; rarely a Chinese coolie too engrossed in self, too earth-busied to revere and to enjoy intensely the pictures of the sky.

Dark as the night had been, a few stars had winked down on So Wing all his perilled way. They were going now.

So Wing drew an incense-paper from his loin-cloth, and, glad to find it still unmoistened from his body’s heat, stuck it on a thorn-bush, when searching with his lantern he had found one, struck his flints together until a spark came, and lit his red prayer so. Then he made low obeisance to the paling North Star and muttered softly salutation to Tou Mu the Bushel Mother. It was to her, the goddess of the North Star, that he had offered the incense burning on the thorn-bush.

So Wing sat down on the pathside, and waited patiently for sunrise to paint the sky.

The indescribable splendour came. So Wing had not panted, as alone in the darkness he climbed his endless path of broken rocks. He was panting now—softly—in ecstasy; all his being enriched by every tint of loveliness that crept shyly across the heavens before it rent them and blazoned them proudly, imperiously in swathes of splendour; the splendour of a day’s birth, the exquisite beauty of the new day’s sumptuous, flaming swaddling clothes; just-born day all raw-red, diapered in dazzling gold, green and violet, saffron and rose. So Wing’s naked breast heaved and fell from the throbbing of his Chinese-coolie heart. His eyes filled.

When the sunrise had gone, and the big brazen day-star held its hot state alone in the almost purple sky, So Wing rose and went his way, stealing his breakfast as he went—filching it from the pathside’s unguarded larder. It was a strictly vegetarian break of several hours’ fast, for he had brought nothing with him; but oranges, wild pears—not too ripe—nuts, all young and milky, yellow hips, sorrel, and a melon sufficed hungered So Wing.

Q’ūo Toon, not knowing that he had, had told So Wing how to find the mart So sought. So had all the ten li well mapped in his retentive Chinese mind. Twenty times where the path forked, or where there was none, he might have taken the wrong way; but not once did he. A homing pigeon could not have gone more surely than So Wing went from Q’ūo Chung’s chia to Market-Town-By-The-Swinging-Bridge.

But he looked about him now as he journeyed, storing in his eager mind hillsides and vistas that rose and stretched on every side, valleys and tarns down below him; seeing it all, locking it securely in his memory for future enjoyment, possibly for future use. Thrift, ambition, and zest for pleasure kept as yet equal pace in the character of So Wing. And to him there was no pleasure greater than the sight of beauty, no joy keener than remembering it, tasting it on memory’s delicate palate, tasting it again and again. He would cherish this, to perfume and gladden duller, bleaker days.

Not all of Yün-nan is beautiful. Much of it is just roughly churned rock, much is flat and drab. But it has room for much picture as well; Yün-nan is vast, China’s third province in size, its area almost one-fourth more than Great Britain’s. And this was one of Yün-nan’s countless beauty-spots.

The ragged river ran and danced far below, but clear in the day’s clear brilliance to the sharp sight of So Wing.

He could count a score of villages—very sparsely housed some of them—he could count a dozen tributary streamlets; he saw twenty bridges, all of them beautiful, most of them durable, and strangely costly to have been built in “poor” Yün-nan; a province of inexhaustible wealth, very little of which is on the surface yet. Yün-nan wears her jewels hidden deep down in her ample bosom; she is meanly clad. But her bridges tell the tale of solid substance and of a less miserly past.

So much of Chinese life is lived on her rivers’ banks, her traffic and her commerce are so preponderantly river-born, that one can understand how it came that nothing was spared in Chinese bridge-building, nothing of architectural beauty and variety, nothing of stanchness of structure; and can understand why it is that in all China a bridge once built not often is neglected and left to deteriorate. The Chinese rarely repair; but they mend their bridges. The ruin and decay of their roadways, and the wanton destruction of their forests are the twin national scandals of China; the upkeep of their bridges is a national virtue; a providentness which not their temples nor their pagodas can boast of them. Over yonder the little white temple that gleamed among the grey-green eucalyptus was but a lovely ruin; the dilapidation of the pai-fang that rose above a sloping field of crimson ice-flowers mocked the hero it once had commemorated; but the four-arched bridge that spanned the river between them, built centuries longer ago than they, was still solid and impregnable, well fit to defy time and weather and their cruel ravishments, because it never had known the humiliation of neglect. Its clear reflection in the river was gaily painted: the vivid reflection of a bridge that looked a four-arched stone rainbow, because of the variegated limestone of which it was made. There are hundreds of such highly-coloured limestone bridges in Yün-nan—perhaps thousands.

Beyond the grey-green eucalyptus grove the hillside was mantled by a forest at once so dense, motionless and deeply, brilliantly green that it looked cut out of solid malachite. But a thousand willows frothed it with a softer, tenderer green.

Nearer, where the ground dipped into a sheltered, sunny cup, a horde of sturdy wild ponies were feeding on the long sweet-grass, interrupting their own gluttony now and then to jostle, chase, and bite each other in play. So Wing longed to be among them, to conquer and ride. None of them could throw him. So Wing was no mean horseman; few Northern Chinese are. Swine, cattle, and sheep were browsing and rooting in stolid comfort and composure, almost between the wild ponies’ shaggy feet.

There were birds and butterflies everywhere. Reeves pheasants—others even handsomer—were worm hunting between the poppy flowers, and where the twinkling blue stars of myriad forget-me-nots looked heaven come to earth. Sweet-voiced blackcaps sang above the buckwheat that an orange-beaked family of blue-green bandit-birds was industriously thieving. There were silver-breasted doves cooing on the willow-trees, and the thrushes sang above a sea of wild white roses, as if half intoxicated with the roses’ fragrance, and the air quivered with the beating of the great wings of wild geese that were off to the Min River. Going off to bathe and drink, magpies parted the waist-high ferns they loved to rest in. Cuckoos called. A great turkey was headed for Burmah, a pair of falcons were making for Tonkin. Bees buzzed about the gigantic swallow-orchids that climbed and festooned the pepper-trees.

So Wing left it all reluctantly. But soon his seeing of the market town he sought, in the near distance, rewarded him. He was hungry again; he’d buy food in the market. And then he’d find and secure what he wished for much more; what he had come all this far way to get.